Drip Email Marketing for SaaS Businesses: How to Find the Right Marketing Automation Software for Your Business

Did you know that drip campaigns have an 80% more open rate than single-send emails? Even more, they have been proven to generate 300% higher click-through rates. No doubt, these eye-opening statistics have made you realize that this powerful marketing strategy is worth learning about if you're looking for ways to boost your conversion rates and grow your SaaS business.

Have we piqued your curiosity enough? Now, let's set clear expectations on what you'll learn in this article. We've put together a detailed explanation of drip email marketing for SaaS businesses. You'll also learn practical ways to set up a drip email marketing campaign and how to get the most out of it. Before we begin, what is drip marketing?

Table of Contents

• What is Drip Email Marketing?
• Whey Should You Use a Drip Campaign?
• When Should You Use a Drip Campaign?
• How to Set Up a Drip Email Marketing Campaign
• How to Find the Right Email Automation Software for Your Business
• Wrapping Up

What is Drip Marketing?

Drip email marketing is the process of sending automated emails to users or customers based on specific events or actions over a certain period.

A drip campaign is focused on delivering the correct information to a particular audience at the right time. If someone signs up for a demo, you can send a welcome email right away, then a few days later, you can send a lead nurturing email including a short video clip of various ways your product features can solve their business needs.

The ultimate goal of drip marketing is to build a chain of communication and subsequently drive an audience toward the path to purchase instead of hard selling to them right away. You can think of it as gently leading the prospect by the hand, revealing various means you can help them, then building their interest and providing a call-to-action towards the end of the process. Many businesses use drip campaigns to communicate with an audience in a personalized and targeted manner.

You can use Drip campaigns when:

• Someone placing an order
• Not using your product for a while
• Engaging with customer support

Drip marketing is effective and powerful because the process is automated and sent on a scheduled time in response to an audience-specific action. But why should you use this powerful tool in your marketing strategy?

This brings us to the next section.

Why Should You Use Drip Campaigns?

Drip campaigns maintain a deep level of connection with prospects. It can help you boost conversion rates by turning your website visitors into loyal customers. When you consistently communicate your product's value, you create the opportunity to build a long-lasting relationship with your audience and show that you're the best option for their business needs, challenges, and goals.

A study has shown that a drip campaign has 3x click-throughs than single emails, which means that you can engage with your prospects and build their interest in your product until they are ready to buy from your brand. You would have established a level of trust with your prospects, which lowers the barrier to entry.

People will be more willing to buy from your brand if:

• They become familiar with your product's value and solution
• You provide the resources that will help them solve their problems and achieve a goal.
• They see that other people have derived value from your product's features by reading customer testimonials.

When Should You Use a Drip Campaign?

When it comes to drip campaigns, there are many occasions you can apply it in your marketing efforts. Let's take a look at 8 different drip campaign use cases.

1. Lead nurturing: a Lead is someone who has expressed interest in your product. Most times, they need a little hand-holding to make a purchase. You can nurture a lead through several means such as blog posts, onboarding emails, or free trials. Studies have shown that lead nurturing can drive 50% more sales-ready customers.

Although, you'd need to apply an automated means to communicate with a lead because you can't simply nurture every single business lead. You can set up engagement drips, onboarding drips, or a payment process drip to drive your leads to convert into paying customers.

2. Onboarding Emails: you can get users to sign up for free trials, but how do you lead them to pay for your product which is where onboarding drip emails come in. With this drip campaign strategy, you can include specific actions that your user can take to drive them to use and pay for your product.

Such actions include: signing up for a webinar, downloading a white paper, or your company's mobile app. Users also have the option to upgrade to a premium service.

3. Welcome Emails: you've successfully attracted an audience to your company's products, even get them to sign up for free trials. But it doesn't end there. Lead them to the ultimate goal: to learn about your product and start deriving value from it. How do you get them to this stage?

A welcome email is key to showcasing your company's product features and top content and leading your audience to use your product. If someone signs up for a free trial, a welcome email is a way to show the user how other customers are using your product.

Even more, welcome emails serve as a means to say a simple "Hi, thank you for signing up for our newsletter. " So, don't hesitate to craft an engaging welcome drip campaign. Your audience will be more willing to engage with your brand and know more about your product.

4. Re-engagement emails: when you provide the opportunity for people to re-engage with your brand, they will most likely return to being paying customers. This kind of drip campaign is targeted at contacts that have been quiet for a while (meaning they haven't made purchases or read your emails). Re-engagement emails are great engagement starters because you can get inactive users back to using your website or mobile app.

It lets you invite a user to revisit your website and get updated on the latest opportunities. You may change it to product features or special deal offers. If your contacts still fail to re-engage with your brand, then it may be best to get them off your contact list. Your list should contain high-quality customers that are interested in your brand.

5. Recommendation emails: a drip campaign lets you offer product recommendations to your customers based on their previous purchases. However, you must remember that your drips should be completely relevant and provide products that match each of your customers' needs. This way, your contacts will feel like each email was specifically written and designed for them.

6. Event series: just hosted an online event and need to follow up with your attendees? Or maybe you're yet to host one, and you need to inform your guest about your events. You can use an email drip campaign to communicate with your contacts before and after your event.

For example, when planning an event, you can build a list of attendees and get them to register for your event. Once the contact signs up for the event, this will lead them to another drip campaign that tracks registered guests. This campaign throws light on the menu details and arrival time.

7. Renewals: if your customer's subscription is about to expire, you can use an email drip campaign to engage your customer. The email should notify the user that you will charge their account. It should also include the customer's account details, date, and time of expiration. When your customers renew their subscription, remember to send them a thank you email drip for choosing your product again.

How to Set Up an Email Drip Marketing Campaign

Now, you've learned most of the ways you can leverage drip campaigns in your marketing efforts. But how do you set up an actual email drip marketing campaign? Let's begin! This section will help you know the steps to building a successful drip campaign. Here are 5 steps that you can implement.

1.  Identify your target audience

Before you begin your drip marketing campaign, you need to dig deep into your contact list and identify various customer segments that you will use for your drip campaign strategy. You must identify your customers, their buying behavior, goals, pain points, purchase history, etc.

For Drip Emails, there are two types of trigger segmentation. You can segment your target audience based on actions or demographic triggers.

• Action trigger-based segmentation means that you group your audience into segments based on how they interact with your product. For example, a user completes a purchase on your site, and then you automatically send them a receipt, including their billing information. Or a user signs up for a free trial, you automatically send them a series of instructional emails that will help them throughout the trial period.
• Demographic trigger-based segmentation: is focused on tracking customer behavior and directing them towards a conversion. For example, a user has been inactive after using your product for a while. So, you send them an automated email offering some assistance and other tips. Or a user signs up for your product but didn't use it, and you can send them an automated email asking if they need assistance.

Try to segment your target audience based on specific characteristics such as how often they use your product, when they signed up, how long they have been using your product and how long they've been paying customers.

2. Create your message

Once you've identified your target audience, including the customer segments that you want to target in your drip campaigns, you can start planning the message you intend to send to them. What do you want your user to achieve? You need to craft your message in a way that grabs their attention.

Do you want them to use your product more often? Or what do you want your user to learn about the newly updated product feature you just released? Based on your answer, you need to create a valuable, detailed, and actionable copy. Ensure that you maintain a clear and consistent brand voice throughout all your emails.

3. Plan your campaign

This phase usually involves deep thinking and serious planning. You need to figure out the workflow of your entire drip campaign.

Here are some questions to answer when planning your drip campaign strategy.

• How many emails will I send during the campaign?
• How will I send each email?
• How will I measure the success of the drip campaign?

4. Automate the Entire Process

Automation is where the fun begins. Once you've finalized your strategy, you can set off the campaign and start sending your emails. You can achieve this with a drip automation software of your choice.

5. Analyze the results and adjust as necessary

Even though you automate your drip campaign, you need to constantly monitor the effectiveness of your campaign and adjust it according to the results you get.  Most times, this may involve readjusting your customer segments and drip campaign strategy. If users are not converting, then change your call-to-actions. If your open rates are low, then rewrite your email sub headline.

How to find the Right Email Automation Software for Your Business

As you know, a drip marketing campaign isn't about sending random emails to anyone hoping that they will buy from your company. It's more about delivering a personalized copy to specific customer segments for increased conversions.

However, for your drip campaign to run smoothly, you need great marketing automation software. Choosing the right software is crucial to your marketing efforts. Here are the most important factors to consider when selecting your drip marketing software:

1.  Integration

Creating, managing lists, and sending emails is time-consuming. So, it would help if you chose a drip automation software that integrates with your platform, app, or CRM.

This integration will provide you with a convenient solution to organize and manage customer data and provide you with a means to analyze important metrics such as open rates and click-through rates. This way, you can know which campaigns are performing best and those not generating positive results.

With Engage, you don't need to start from scratch. Engage supports top messaging service providers like Amazon SES, Mailgun, Sparkpost, Twilio, and more to power your messaging.

2. Reading and viewing options

Mobile optimization is no longer an option; it's a necessity. A study has shown that 43% of people now check their emails on their smartphones every day, which means that most people no longer open emails from a desktop. Instead, they choose the flexibility and ease that smartphones provide. So, you must choose a drip automation software with mobile-optimized templates. If your email isn't displayed correctly on your contact's screen, they won't hesitate to drop it off immediately.

3. Segmentation and personalization

With the right drip marketing automation software, you can segment your contact lists into common groupings, which will help you send hyper-targeted and personalized emails to your audience.

4. Response handling

The case of response handling depends on different factors. If you're a small business that sends emails to about 1,000 people, you'll probably need less automation and response handling. However, if your company sends out a large volume of emails, you need to choose an automation software that will enable you to send automated responses.

Wrapping Up

Drip Campaigns are a great way to engage your audience and deliver a more personalized message to them. Customers will be more willing to interact with your brand when you show that your product can provide value and solve their needs.

You can achieve this with an excellent drip marketing campaign strategy. Remember to leverage the power of automation to set up workflows for cases such as onboarding, lead nurturing, and welcome messages.

Engage is a marketing automation solution that helps business owners to:

• Track how customers interact with your product,
• Create unique user groups or segments based on your customer events or actions,
• Send Personalized Messages to your customers via Email, SMS, Push Notifications, and Web In-app Messages, and
• Create automated messaging sequences to power your entire marketing campaign.

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